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It’s a tale as old as time. Man sees electric bike advertisement touting 50-mile range. Man buys e-bike. Man’s first ride gets 25 miles before the battery’s charge dwindles. Man is justifiably disappointed.

So what gives? Why does it seem like you can never trust the range numbers that the electric bike makers tell us?

The short answer is that it seems that way because that’s the way it is. You simply can’t trust the range figure printed on an electric bicycle’s marketing material. At least not most of the time.

There are several good reasons for this, so let’s break them down.

No standard for range testing for e-bikes

First of all, e-bikes aren’t like cars. There aren’t any standards for battery range testing on e-bikes. It’s not like the “EPA-rated 32 mpg” or “NEDC-tested 250 miles of range” you’ll see in car ads.

Range ratings for e-bikes aren’t determined by outside agencies. They are determined by the bike makers themselves. In the best case, the printed distance figures come from real-world range testing. Some companies like Aventon and Lectric eBikes have stepped up with real-world range data on their sites for each level of pedal assist or throttle riding. That’s the best case. But in the worst case, some companies just give us numbers that they pull out of a hat or theorize that their bike can probably achieve.

Which companies are which? Without hard data displayed on the company’s site, it’s hard to know. That’s the problem. Unless a company puts real-world testing data out there, we’re left to guess.

lerctric ebikes xpedition dual battery

Range varies WIDELY based on a number of factors

This is actually the single largest reason that you almost never actually achieve the range quoted by the e-bike manufacturer. There is a huge variance in the real world battery range of an e-bike on a single charge. There are literally dozens of factors that have significant impacts on range.

Even if an e-bike company wanted to give one number as the ultimate, end all and be all, certified range of their e-bike – a number that they are confident you can achieve – they simply wouldn’t be able to do it. It just depends on too many factors.

radRunner passengers
Carrying a passenger (or two)? That’ll ding your range

It’s amazing how many factors can have a measurable impact on e-bike range.

Are your tires low on air or pumped to the max? Are you riding uphill or downhill? Tailwind or headwind? Brake rub? Crouched or sitting up tall? Is the road wet? Did you eat a big lunch? Have you eaten big lunches for the last 30 years? What gear are you in? What power level are you in? Knobby or smooth tires? Are you wearing a backpack or carrying cargo on a rack or basket? Any passengers with you? Are you riding on asphalt? Concrete? Dirt? Gravel? Sand? The list goes on and on.

Depending on the answers to those questions, the exact same electric bike could travel 15 miles or 60 miles on a single battery charge. Yeah, it’s wild.

Many people expect e-bike ranges to be more repeatable, similar to car mileage. But then again, consider that unlike cars, which often outweigh their drivers by 20 to 1, you probably outweigh your bike by 3 or 4 to 1. So changes in you or your environment have a much bigger impact on range than they do for other larger vehicles likes cars and trucks.

All of these factors make it harder for e-bike companies to offer a realistic range, and so they usually test for the best-case scenario. That means a lightweight rider (often listed at 150 lb., even though the average American adult female and male each weigh 170 and 200 lb., respectively) riding on a pancake flat and smooth surface with ultra-high air pressure in the tires and with the bike set into its lowest power mode. It’s not “cheating,” assuming they provide the real test data. It’s just putting their best pedaling foot forward. But in the real world, most of us won’t be riding in the same ideal conditions. So the “maximum” range that most e-bike companies quote simply aren’t realistic for most of us.

aventon level 2 review e-bike

Throttle versus pedal assist range

This is another major factor affecting range. Any Europeans reading this, you poor things can ignore this section since your governments don’t believe you can be trusted with throttles. For the Americans, Canadians, Australians, and civil-disobeying Europeans still here with me, listen up.

The general rule of thumb is that throttle riding will nearly halve your range compared to pedal assist. That’s why most e-bike companies will list their maximum range based on pedal assist. When you see an e-bike listed as having a “50-mile range,” that’s almost certainly the pedal assist range. The throttle range is probably closer to 25-30 miles, depending on conditions. A true 50-mile throttle-only range would usually require having a battery of at least 1,300 Wh, or around twice the size of an average e-bike battery.

Some companies like Rad Power Bikes are pretty good about listing a range of ranges (get it?) instead of a single number. For example, they tell us that the RadRunner 3 Plus’s range is “Estimated 25-45+ miles per charge (40-72+ km)” in the specs section of the product page, though they’re still guilty of the slightly misleading “Up to 45 miles per charge” phrase in larger font on the main page.

How can you know an electric bike’s ‘real’ range?

There’s a messy, overgeneralized rule of thumb that I created to quickly judge approximate bike range. But be warned: It requires a small amount of math. Don’t worry though, you can handle it.

At 20 mph, my messy rule of thumb is 25 Wh/mi for throttle riding and 15 Wh/mi for pedal assist riding. This is for a decently powerful level – we’re not talking Eco Mode or Level 1 pedal assist here. At very low-power pedal assist where the rider does most of the work, it is possible to even achieve closer to 5 Wh/mi.

For anyone who uses a more sensical system of measurement, that means when riding at 32 km/h, you can generally expect somewhere around 15 Wh/km on throttle and 9 Wh/km on pedal assist, though it can drop as low as 3 Wh/km on really low power pedal assist.

So to use my rule of thumb, simply divide the watt-hour capacity (Wh) of the battery by my efficiency numbers and you’ll get the rough range. An e-bike like the RadRunner 3 Plus mentioned above with a 624 Wh battery should get roughly 624 Wh ÷ 25 Wh/mi = 25 miles of range on throttle-only riding. In sensical measurements, that’s 624 Wh ÷ 15 Wh/km = 41 km. That number actually aligns nicely with Rad’s published figures. Go figure.

radrunner 3 plus battery

Like I said though, this is a rough approximation. It can vary based on many factors. If you’re a heavy rider, you might even use slightly higher constants than I mentioned, such as 30 Wh/mi instead of 25 Wh/mi. Other factors like terrain and tire width make a big impact on this guesstimate system as well.

For science, I once took an e-bike with a teeny tiny 180 Wh battery on a long ride at the lowest possible power setting and with significant muscle effort on my part. I got a range of 56 miles (90 km), or close to 3 Wh/mi. It was grueling, but it showed what is possible, and how companies can get away with claiming sky-high ranges that may be possible, even if unlikely.

So sure, my generalized rule of thumb above uses fuzzy numbers. But they aren’t anywhere near as fuzzy as the ratings from most e-bike manufacturers.

rad power bikes battery

In conclusion, I don’t intend to claim that there is malice on the part of most companies that market e-bikes. Their goal isn’t to mislead. They’re just caught in an unfortunate system where people want a short and pretty answer to what is under the surface actually a long and ugly question, “How far does it go on a charge?”

So until people are prepared to receive a table of data in response to that question, companies are basically forced to choose between giving an unimpressive albeit more honest range spectrum like, “It can go 20-45 miles per charge,” or to just give the rosier answer of “It can go 45 miles.” With millions of dollars on the line, you can guess which one they prefer to choose.

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As Anthropic tries to keep pace with OpenAI, it’s also taking on the U.S. government

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As Anthropic tries to keep pace with OpenAI, it's also taking on the U.S. government

Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic, at the World Economic Forum in 2025.

Stefan Wermuth | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is doing all it can to keep pace with larger rival OpenAI, which is spending money at a historic pace with backing from Microsoft and Nvidia. Of late, Anthropic has been facing an equally daunting antagonist: the U.S. government.

David Sacks, the venture capitalist serving as President Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, has been publicly criticizing Anthropic for what he’s called a campaign by the company to support “the Left’s vision of AI regulation.”

After Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, AI startup’s head of policy, wrote an essay this week titled “Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear,” Sacks lashed out against the company on X.

“Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering,” Sacks wrote on Tuesday.

OpenAI, meanwhile, has established itself as a partner to the White House since the very beginning of the second Trump administration. On Jan. 21, the day after the inauguration, Trump announced a joint venture called Stargate with OpenAIOracle and Softbank to invest billions of dollars in U.S. AI infrastructure.

Sacks’ criticism of Anthropic hits on the company’s very foundation and its original reason for being. Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei left OpenAI in late 2020 and started Anthropic with a mission to build safer AI. OpenAI had started as a nonprofit lab in 2015, but was rapidly moving towards commercialization, with hefty funding from Microsoft.

Now they’re the two most highly valued private AI companies in the country, with OpenAI commanding a $500 billion valuation and Anthropic capturing a valuation of $183 billion. OpenAI leads the consumer AI market with its ChatGPT and Sora apps, while Anthropic’s Claude models are particularly popular in the enterprise.

When it comes to regulation, the companies have very different views. OpenAI has lobbied for fewer guardrails, while Anthropic has opposed part of the Trump administration’s effort to limit protections.

Anthropic has repeatedly pushed back against efforts by the federal government to preempt state-level regulation of AI, most notably a Trump-backed provision that would have blocked such rules for 10 years.

That proposal, part of the draft “Big Beautiful Bill,” was ultimately abandoned. Anthropic later endorsed California’s SB 53, which would require transparency and safety disclosures from AI companies, effectively going in the opposite direction from the administration’s approach.

“SB 53’s transparency requirements will have an important impact on frontier AI safety,” Anthropic wrote in a blog post on Sept. 8. “Without it, labs with increasingly powerful models could face growing incentives to dial back their own safety and disclosure programs in order to compete.” 

Anthropic didn’t provide a comment for this story. Sacks didn’t respond to a request for comment.

U.S. President Donald Trump sits next to Crypto czar David Sacks at the White House Crypto Summit at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 7, 2025.

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

For Sacks, the priority in AI is to innovate as fast as possible to make sure the U.S. doesn’t lose to China.

“The U.S. is currently in an AI race, and our chief global competition is China,” Sacks said in an onstage interview at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week. “They’re the only other country that has the talent, the resources, and the technology expertise to basically beat us in AI.”

But Sacks has adamantly denied that he’s trying to take down Anthropic in the process of lifting up U.S. AI.

In a post on X on Thursday, Sacks contested a Bloomberg story that linked his comments to growing federal scrutiny of Anthropic.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he wrote. “Just a couple of months ago, the White House approved Anthropic’s Claude app to be offered to all branches of government through the GSA App Store.”

Rather, Sacks claimed that Anthropic has cast itself as a political underdog, positioning its leadership as principled defenders of public safety while pursuing a public campaign that frames any pushback as partisan targeting.

“It has been Anthropic’s government affairs and media strategy to position itself consistently as a foe of the Trump administration,” Sacks said. “But don’t whine to the media that you’re being ‘targeted’ when all we’ve done is articulate a policy disagreement.”

Sacks pointed to several examples of what he sees as adversarial actions. He referenced Dario Amodei’s comparison of Trump to a “feudal warlord” during the 2024 election. Amodei publicly supported Kamala Harris’ campaign for president.

Sacks also referenced op-eds the company ran opposing key parts of the Trump administration’s AI policy agenda, including its proposed moratorium on state-level regulation and elements of its Middle East and chip export strategy. Anthropic also hired senior Biden-era officials to lead its government relations team, Sacks noted.

The AI czar took particular umbrage to Clark’s essay and his warnings about the potentially transformative and destabilizing power of AI.

“My own experience is that as these AI systems get smarter and smarter, they develop more and more complicated goals. When these goals aren’t absolutely aligned with both our preferences and the right context, the AI systems will behave strangely,” Clark wrote. “Another reason for my fear is I can see a path to these systems starting to design their successors, albeit in a very early form.”

Sacks said such “fear-mongering” is holding back innovation.

“It is principally responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem,” Sacks wrote on X.

White House AI czar David Sacks: AI race is even more important than the space race

Anthropic has also stayed away from actions that many other tech companies have taken explicitly to appease Trump.

Leaders from Meta, OpenAI, and Nvidia have courted Trump and his allies, attending White House dinners, committing tens of billions of dollars to U.S. infrastructure projects, and softening their public postures. Amodei wasn’t invited to a recent White House dinner involving numerous industry leaders, the company confirmed to The Information.

Still, Anthropic continues to hold major federal contracts, including a $200 million deal with the Department of Defense and access to federal agencies through the General Services Administration. It also recently formed a national security advisory council to align its work with U.S. interests, and began offering a version of its Claude model to government customers for $1 per year.

But Sacks isn’t the only influential Republican tech investor voicing his critique of the company.

Keith Rabois, whose husband works in the Trump administration, waded into the mix this week.

“If Anthropic actually believed their rhetoric about safety, they can always shut down the company,” Rabois wrote on X. “And lobby then.”

 WATCH: Anthropic’s Mike Krieger on new model release

Anthropic’s Mike Krieger on new model release and the race to build real-world AI agents

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Big MAN arrives: Italian logistics firm rolls out first MAN eTGX 6×2-4 rigid truck

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Big MAN arrives: Italian logistics firm rolls out first MAN eTGX 6x2-4 rigid truck

Italian logistics specialist Fratelli Foppiani Trasporti has become one of the first operators to deploy the new MAN eTGX electric trucks, taking delivery of a 4×2 semi tractor and a new, 6×2-4 rigid truck packing absolutely MASSIVE battery packs that are ready to get to work.

The Italian shipping firm ordered its MAN units back in 2023, making these among the first regular-production electric trucks from the German truck brand to be delivered to customers. The trucks seem to have been worth the wait, too – the 6×2-4 rigid unit packs a whopping 445 kWh modular battery pack while the 4×2 semi arrived with a massive 534 kWh pack, along with MAN SafeStop Assist, MAN OptiView digital mirrors, GM cab, regenerative braking system, TipMatic 4 semiauto transmission, and MAN Digital Services packages.

Those batteries will give the eTGX trucks more than enough range to handle Fratelli Foppiani’s existing 4×2 routes, which go primarily from Corsico (Milan), with routes including Rozzano, Voghera and Brescia. The rigid truck will operate from Busto Arsizio (Varese), serving areas across Milan and Bergamo, Italy.

“This delivery represents a fundamental step forward for sustainable transport in Italy,” said Marc Martinez, Managing Director MAN Truck & Bus Italia. “We are proud to have achieved it together with a long-standing partner such as Fratelli Foppiani, which has once again demonstrated vision and courage.”

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The trucks were delivered during a ceremony at the company’s Corsico headquarters this month, coinciding with the company’s 65th anniversary.

Electrek’s Take


Not shy about the EV part; via MAN.

MAN Trucks’ fleet advisors believe that, in most cases, an electric semi will pay for itself in about three years, thanks in part to Europe’s much higher diesel fuel prices compared to the US (about $6.80/gal compared to $3.70 here, last time I checked).

Doing that complicated fleet assessment math for me, while giving me one of the best headlines in the industry, is just one more reason I love these guys.

SOURCE | IMAGES: MAN Truck & Bus Italia.


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FLIT’s new folding e-bike comes with a free pound of caviar and a side of satire

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FLIT’s new folding e-bike comes with a free pound of caviar and a side of satire

In the increasingly posh world of premium folding electric bikes, one British company is putting its tongue firmly in its cheek – and maybe a few fish eggs on your toast – to highlight what it sees as the absurdity of e-bike pricing.

FLIT, a Cambridge-based folding e-bike maker, just announced a new bundle deal pairing its lightweight FLIT M2 e-bike with a half-kilo tin of high-grade caviar. The price? £5,800 (that’s around €6,700 or US $7,800) – the same as a certain newly launched titanium competitor across town.

The not-so-subtle jab is aimed squarely at Brompton’s just-released Electric T Line, a beautiful machine to be sure, but one that comes with a premium price tag despite only being about half a kilogram lighter than FLIT’s own M2. That’s a £3,300 price difference — or, as FLIT puts it, about £7 per gram of weight saved.

“If that’s the going rate for weight savings, we figured we’d throw in something else that sells for £7 a gram,” said FLIT co-founder Alex Murray, referring to the delicacy from Fortnum & Mason’s, a luxury caviar. “Given the cost of living right now, we decided to give commuters what they’re clearly calling for: a folding e-bike and a tin of caviar to power their ride.”

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Humor aside, FLIT is making a serious point about premium e-bike design and the seemingly crazy price inflation in the high-end electric bike market. The FLIT M2 weighs just 14.5 kg or 32 lb (that’s with the battery) and was engineered from the ground up as a purpose-built e-bike – not a retrofit of an existing frame. It uses aerospace-grade adhesive bonding instead of welding and is hand-assembled in Cambridge. The result is a compact, cleanly integrated bike that folds down small without the need for pricey materials like titanium.

And while it might not be carbon-fiber light or titanium-trimmed, the M2 still packs good commuter specs: 250W rear hub motor (the legal limit in much of Europe), 230Wh integrated battery, hydraulic disc brakes, and a 50 km (31 mile) range. Plus, it starts at just £2,499 (approximately €2,900 or US$3,400). That’s roughly the price of two M2s and a weekend away, compared to the high-end rival they’re not so gently poking in the ribs.

FLIT says its goal is to make fast, flexible urban mobility more accessible. And while they’re clearly having fun with the marketing, they’re also making a solid case that you don’t have to choose between high-end engineering and a reasonable price tag.

“Oh, and I’m serious about the caviar,” added Murray. “Call us.”

Electrek’s Take

Alright, this is pretty silly, but I like the point they’re making. And it’s worth pointing out how this isn’t just an exercise in comparing a budget bike to a premium bike. The FLIT M2 is very much a high-end bike in its own right. I test rode an earlier version last summer and called it “The e-bike Brompton should have built” at the time.

The engineer in me appreciates the exotic materials in Brompton’s latest machine, but as a city commuter with rent to pay, I just can’t fathom the price tag. So if a well-made and equally performing folding commuter e-bike can do the job for less than half the price (or the same price with a bucket of expensive caviar thrown in), that gets my attention!

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